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HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Access

Diary time! Today, in the 7th diary, we continue showing off features in Man the Guns, but don’t worry - there are loads more coming! The topics for today both concern access.

Sea zone access
With MTG it will now be possible for players to mark sea zones as either Avoid or Banned. A zone marked as Avoid will be treated as dangerous and, well, something to avoid if possible. This goes for all ship routing. So if enemy submarines are decimating your shipping you will be able to route it elsewhere, perhaps somewhere safer and closer to an ally. Ships will still route through a zone marked as Avoid if there is no other way to get where they are going.

route.jpg


A Banned zone won't allow moving through it at all, except by manual player moves, or say if it’s an invasion order triggered by the player. It will for example even shut down trading if there are no other possible paths. Zone markings are shown in the naval mapmode and can both be toggled directly on strategic area alerts, or in the new “state view” for the sea. Here we also show a proper breakdown on the level of naval supremacy in the area much like you are used to for air zones instead of the old sparse tooltip. You’ll have to excuse my sneaky censoring as not to spoil a future topic however ;)

state.jpg


At this point I am sure some aspiring u-boat captains are wondering why the enemy can’t just shuffle their shipping routes constantly to avoid being located and interdicted. Changing your route will put its efficiency at 0, so if you continuously change settings you won’t be able to move things through the route. That said, there might be some good strategy in sometimes changing things up to make it harder for the enemy to concentrate their raiders.


Docking Rights
Asking for or receiving Docking Rights are new diplomatic actions. They function like military access “light” and allow someone access to base out of, resupply and repair in your naval bases. In fact military access by necessity automatically comes with docking rights. Docking rights can give you better reach and avoid troublesome paths. For example, German subs will be able to operate out of Spanish ports (if permission is granted) and threaten British shipping in areas where defending them is trickier and they won’t have to pass through the channel or more guarded waters.

dr.jpg


When it comes to repair and such you will be at a lower priority than the owner of the port, but you will have to wait for a future dev diary for more details on how the new repair system functions in detail. Ships in a neutral port that are there due to docking rights can not be attacked with aerial strikes on the base, so if you want to get rid of ships operating there you will need to draw the harboring nation into war also.

That’s all for this time folks. Tune in next week for a *cough* explosive update.

Rejected Titles:
  • This feature was inspired by the famous documentary Das Boot
  • A pouch of tricks
  • Tuesday Teaser Extended Cut HD
  • Nono, these U-Boats are on holiday here in Spain
  • “Should we be worried that Command is sending us, specifically this ship, into a zone marked as Avoid?”
  • Blockchain for dummies - naval edition
  • This dev diary has probably the worst Dev-Time-Needed to Feature-Dev-Diary-Length ratio
 
Looks nice:)

What will happen if you ban a seazone while submarines engage convoys in that seazone, will the battle continue or will the convoys simply disappear?
they are in the combat already so no teleport for them.

Praise be!

Question @podcat : If invasion orders still go through banned zones will there be some other way to get them to avoid some zones if other routes are available? (Bay of biscay)

not right now at least. rerouting invasion plans throught the access system would be quite fiddly, complex and likely would open up exploits. I can definitly agree on it popping up as an issue from time to time though, but we arent quite sure what the best solution would be here yet.

Does the yellow triangle block trade but still allow fleet missions? To quote myself from the teaser thread:

So yellow is "Avoid". that means trade will try not to go through it, but if its the only route it will still do it. if it was set to Blocked then instead the trade would not function.

Can't you already do it right now with military access? So both hostile fleets repair peacefully in the same port but as soon as they exit the harbor they fight each other in the neighboring seazone?
Never did it so I really don't know though.
yea basically. no fighting in neutral harbor. you can pretend the sailors meet up in the local bar and there is a really uncomfortable vibe though. possibly fistfights.

How likely is the AI going to allow/deny access to the player.
And yes I do understand alot has to due with your relations but as of now one can have good relations but still be denied a request by the player from the AI.
So relations is only one of the things ai looks at, it also looks at potential enemy relations and such and impact to itself in general. specific ai questions like this is hard to answer early as well, stuff tend to change with play feedback
 
@podcat
I can understand knowing the Air superiority levels, as people can see the planes + radar etc. I can also understand roughly knowing the ship numbers close to shore, but out in the Pacific the sea areas are so large how would you know what's out there. Could this not be altered slightly so that Encryption/Decryption + closeness to shoreline + Radar have an influence on what you know.

well effectively thats how it works for seeing the enemy. you see a range based on intel etc. if there is no intel you wont know much of anything.

So what do we have here? Does it mean 2 subs (or non-capital) and 0 Capital Ships?

87751a9cb3445a88393f4e97aa8d1d91.png
2 non capital (mostly subs.. well it is 2 subs in this case)
 
And I bet we must wait for Expert AI do add option to set these for the entire alliance so Italy doesn't sink a million guys in the Mediterranean in the first months of war, but maybe I am wrong and AI will be smarter about naval transportation let's hope and wait.
 
So yellow is "Avoid". that means trade will try not to go through it, but if its the only route it will still do it. if it was set to Blocked then instead the trade would not function.
So is it not possible to have a region blocked off from trade while still allowing ships to perform missions there? I understand sending ships to sea tiles manually is still an option in otherwise blocked zones, but does that include assigning missions to those regions?

Say, I want to reroute my transatlantic convoys to not go through the Central Atlantic, but still want a fleet of destroyers there on patrol hunting for U-Boats. Is that possible?
 
So is it not possible to have a region blocked off from trade while still allowing ships to perform missions there? I understand sending ships to sea tiles manually is still an option in otherwise blocked zones, but does that include assigning missions to those regions?

Say, I want to reroute my transatlantic convoys to not go through the Central Atlantic, but still want a fleet of destroyers there on patrol hunting for U-Boats. Is that possible?
if you give a specific order in an area set to avoid, that trumps it. so yea you can still do that
 
So is it not possible to have a region blocked off from trade while still allowing ships to perform missions there? I understand sending ships to sea tiles manually is still an option in otherwise blocked zones, but does that include assigning missions to those regions?

Say, I want to reroute my transatlantic convoys to not go through the Central Atlantic, but still want a fleet of destroyers there on patrol hunting for U-Boats. Is that possible?

The screen is showing that the "ban" order is a "no-go" for trade ship but fleet will go through if no other route.
Pretty sure if you ask your fleet to patrol it, there is no other route to reach that sea zone. But I might be mistaken.
 
A country has no many ways to support one side of the war without direct involvement, but there should be some kind of counter beyond merely lowering the opinion that the other side has of you. For example, Spain was devastated after the civil war but supported Germany by giving it access to spanish ports and airports, selling invaluable wolframium (needed for tank production) and even sending volunteers to fight the USSR. However, the degree of support varied during the war depending on how clear German victory was. The UK was able to pressure Spain to keep its support at a minimum, under the thread that Spain could not defend the Canary Islands and its few African colonies against the Allies if Spain entered in the war. But without pressing too far, because the UK did not want Spain to enter the war.

I think something similar should be added into the game, to allow diplomatic pressure. For example to make a country negate access to another, under the threat of economic blockade, casus belli or war. This could be useful to simulate the situation where the US forces an oil blockade against Japan, which ultimately forces Japan to gambit war. Germany could force Switzerland and Sweden to commerce with them if these countries judge there is no way they could defend against an invasion.
 
What about Air base access between countries? As far as i know, today general military access does not include air base usage right? Only for faction members. Will it be finally possible with new update? Am i dumb and don't know how to request air base usage?
 
convoys can't exit combat, they're forever stuck until either side dies, so probably no.

Which begs the question - is it at all possible for convois to be on both sides of a battle? If yes, this could lead to quite interesting situations...

@Topic: Not much to say here. A long requested feature, looking nice at first glance. I especially like the new 'province view' as you called it. I always found that part of naval warfare somewhat unclear, this seems like a good improvement on it.
 
@podcat A greatly needed feature to avoid "shortest-path" convoy routes plaguing the convoy war.

I'm curious to know to what extent this can be implemented. As a typical USA player, I assume it can be easily used to keep convoys away from the European coastline, forcing your precious LL convoys to take the true northern route. But I'm more interested in how to block a specific port from being an ingress or egress point. Would blocking a specific port's coastal sea zone be the only step required? If I wanted to send all USA "trade" from west coast USA only, do I simply block off all of the USA East coast coastal zones? If I wanted to ensure that USA sends all LL to USSR via Vladivostok, do I block off all USSR coastal sea zones with ports except Vladivostok?

Moreover it seems that there needs to be some type of convoy limit per port based on infrastructure of the area surrounding the port back to the capital and port size. Else this can be a highly abused system. USA and USSR shouldn't be able to trade via several hundred convoys, via 2 level 1 ports, located in distant regions from the capital.

While this would add a lot more manual steps, I'm wondering if this really needs to be done on a per convoy route, rather than global convoy routes. Maybe not, as any enemy of yours will attack any one of your convoys, regardless of its destination country.

Will the routes that the AI chooses to block off be moddable in any way? I fear the AI won't use this feature very effectively, and will need help from the community.
 
Which begs the question - is it at all possible for convois to be on both sides of a battle? If yes, this could lead to quite interesting situations...

I think I've seen this happen in 1.5 with the addition of fleets in battle being able to "intercept" troop transport convoys, if troops from "the other side" are sailing through the same seazone where a convoy battle already is in progress.
 
Does docking rights mean I can move supply and trade through those ports?
 
Regarding AI use, have you already tested this to ensure Germany NEVER sends transports out into the Atlantic, and the AI would realize that the only troop transport route to Africa is to send troops to Italy and then use its ally's ports in southern Italy to cross the med? By blocking off the Horn and the Cape, can simply blocking off two sea zones finally prevent ill-advised trade and troop transports between GER and JAP?
 
Good stuff!